If you were comfortable with the death penalty, you might rethink your position now that Chambers’ district attorney office has withheld bombshell defense evidence in a capital case.

Papers filed Thursday in Lincoln County District Court accuse her staff of hiding key facts — including a threatening letter and the killing of another inmate. Both were crucial to David Bueno’s ability to defend himself against charges he murdered a fellow inmate at the Limon Correctional Facility.

“Words cannot express the enormity of this discovery violation and the detrimental impact it had on Mr. Bueno’s defense,” public defenders railed. “The nondisclosure of this type of information, contained within their own file, in a death penalty case, violates fundamental fairness and is shocking to the universal sense of justice.”

She has been criticized for pursuing the death penalty only slightly less casually than ordering a tuna sandwich.

Eyebrows were raised in 2006 when she sought execution for Bueno, then a convicted burglar and robber, for the 2004 stabbing death of Jeffrey Heird, a white supremacist labeled as a rat for not warning fellow white inmates about a drug bust in prison.

A jury took nearly four days to find Bueno guilty of first- degree murder, and about two hours to sentence him to life in prison rather than death by lethal injection, as Chambers had sought.

Bueno’s defense centered on the theory that white supremacists at the prison killed Heird and blamed his death on three Hispanic inmates, including Bueno and his co-defendant, Alejandro Perez.

Prosecutors were fully aware of that strategy, yet failed to disclose the fact that minutes after finding Heird’s body, a prison nurse found a letter written by the Aryan Nation threatening to “exterminate” white inmates who “refuse to accept their proud race.”

Prosecutors also failed to reveal the fact that two days after Heird’s death, another white inmate was found in the same living unit with blunt chest trauma. David Hollenbeck died three days later. He was named in the Aryan Nation letter as a specific target.

It’s a cornerstone of our justice system that prosecutors have a statutory, constitutional and moral obligation to disclose any exculpatory material they have to defense lawyers.

Chambers would be disingenuous to claim her staff didn’t have the letter or know about Hollenbeck’s death. And it would be dubious for the DA’s office to argue that it wasn’t aware the information would help Bueno’s defense.

Of course, the state should play by the rules in any criminal case. But even the most gung-ho death-penalty supporters would agree that in a capital case, prosecutors’ hands must be especially clean.

Chambers’ team of pit bulls in the Bueno case included Robert Watson, now the elected district attorney for Fort Morgan. It also included Dan May, now the elected DA in El Paso County. May’s office is being investigated for withholding evidence in the case of Tim Kennedy, whose murder conviction was lifted in April.

What boils my blood even more is this: Chambers’ office had turned over 31,006 pages of evidence when Bueno’s capital murder trial began in 2008. As of this week, 65,429 pages have been disclosed. That means more evidence has come forward in the 17 months since Bueno’s conviction than before he was tried — and only, in large part, because the judge presiding over Perez’s case ordered it.

And get this.

Once Chambers’ office finally got around to handing over what are arguably the two most compelling pages of evidence for the defense, it had the nerve to crow that it was doing so with “an abundance of caution.”

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.

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